Gladys Hulette

Gladys Hulette (July 21, 1896 – August 8, 1991) was an American actress born in Arcade, New York, whose career spanned stage, silent film, and early sound pictures. The daughter of an opera star, Hulette first appeared on stage at age three and made her screen debut at seven. She went on to become a recognized presence in both Broadway theater and the silent film industry, with a career that extended into the mid-1930s.

Hulette's Broadway work ran from 1906 to 1912 and encompassed a range of dramatic productions. Her credits included The Kreutzer Sonata (1906), A Doll's House (1907), and Sappho and Phaon, which opened in Providence, Rhode Island on October 4, 1907, with Hulette among the principal players supporting Bertha Kalich in the Percy MacKaye production. She appeared in The Faith Healer (1910) and The Blue Bird (1910), in which she played the role of Tyltyl. Her final Broadway credit during this period was Little Women (1912), where she portrayed Beth. As a child performer she also appeared in Romeo and Juliet (1908) and The Smoke Fairy (1909).

Her transition to film came during the early years of silent cinema, when Broadway actors faced a social stigma for appearing on screen. Hulette later recalled that the earliest film performers were largely drawn from outside the theatrical world, and that it took a prominent stage actor agreeing to play Hamlet on screen to begin drawing established theater talent into the new medium. Her earliest film work was done under contract to Vitagraph Studios.

By 1917, Hulette's films were being produced by director William Parke, and that year she appeared in Streets of Illusion, her most popular film to that point. Her co-stars in the production included Richard Barthelmess and J.H. Gilmour. That same year she married William Parke Jr., the director's son; the couple divorced in 1924. Parke owned theatrical companies and continued to work with Hulette on a series of successful productions.

By 1921 Hulette was considered a veteran of the motion picture industry. She again appeared opposite Barthelmess in Tol'able David, playing the ingenue role of Esther Hatburn, a part she described in interviews as her ideal type of role. She later pursued comedy-drama parts, appearing in Jack O' Hearts (1926) and A Bowery Cinderella (1927). For her role as a dance hall girl in The U.P. Trail (1924), a Fox Film production shot over two months in Nevada, Hulette researched the part by consulting Social Life of the Pioneers, an 1880s San Francisco publication, through which she found historical context for the role of young women entertainers in frontier saloons.

Hulette made her sound film debut in Torch Singer (1933), followed by Her Resale Value (1933) and uncredited appearances in The Girl From Missouri and One Hour Late, both released in 1934. In 1948, she and former Thanhouser player Grace DeCarlton were both employed as ticket sellers at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. In the early 1980s, film historian Walter Coppedge visited Hulette while she was living as a ward of the state in an institution in Rosemead, California. Hulette died on August 8, 1991, in Montebello, California, at the age of 95.